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1988-2008: Climate Then and Now

By Andrew C. Revkin June 23, 2008 11:48 amJune 23, 2008 11:48 am

Discover Magazine ran my first long story on climate in October 1988.

Global warming has felt like breaking news a few times in recent years. But the first big pulse of coverage and public attention came in 1988, when the Amazon rain forest and Yellowstone were ablaze, a searing drought had farmers kicking dusty fields in frustration, and global temperatures had seen enough of a rise that a NASA climate expert, James Hansen, asserted before a Senate panel that statistics showed “the greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now.”

I thought it might be worth inviting you all to read and “annotate” (as we’ve done with a couple of climate speeches and a polar bear decision recently) my cover story for Discover Magazine, reported through that hot year and published in the October 1988 edition. I asked the current management there if they’d post the original article. They liked the idea, but the article was so old that it wasn’t even available in electronic form, so they had to type it up. Here’s the story, “Endless Summer: Living With the Greenhouse Effect.” (It is not just about adapting to climate change, despite the headline; always remember, writers don’t control headlines.) Melissa Lafsky of the magazine also did a brief e-mail interview with me, which is on their Reality Base blog.

I’ll start by posting some relevant sections below and offering some reflections on how the story has stood the test of time. I’d enjoy seeing your reactions, pro or con.

I was not at the Senate Energy Committee hearing when Dr. Hansen testified. But I had been focused on climate and humans since 1984, when I began reporting what would end up being a long cover story for Science Digest magazine assessing nuclear winter, kind of the inverse potential human impact on climate (global cooling from a pall of smoke rising from incinerated cities). I went to Toronto one week after Dr. Hansen’s testimony to report from the first international “Conference on the Changing Atmosphere” — one of the seminal meetings building momentum toward the first report of the newborn Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Nuclear winter, as I wrote in 1985, was more nuanced than the initial dramatic concept, morphing from a Page One post-apocalyptic apocalypse into a more subtle phenomenon, labeled “nuclear autumn” by Stephen H. Schneider. What is distinct about global warming is that the basics of 100-year-old theory have stood the test of time (more CO2 = warming world = less ice + higher seas and lots of climate change). Let’s dive into my old story to see what has, and has not, changed.

After an opening section leading off with Dr. Hansen’s testimony:

Until this year, despite dire warnings from climatologists, the greenhouse effect has seemed somehow academic and far off. The idea behind it is simple: gases accumulating in the atmosphere as by-products of human industry and agriculture — carbon dioxide, mostly, but also methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, and chlorofluorocarbon — let in the sun’s warming rays but don’t let excess heat escape. As a result, mean global temperature has probably been rising for decades. But the rise has been so gradual that it has been masked by the much greater, and ordinary, year-to-year swings in world temperature.

In my YouTube interview with Dr. Hansen, he discusses how the public remains attuned mainly to anomalies on short time scales — cold or warm — and misses the point that it is the long-term trend that he and other experts say will transform the planet, but at a pace invisible day to day.

Not anymore, said Hansen. The 1980s have already seen the four hottest years on record, and 1988 is almost certain to be hotter still. Moreover, the seasonal, regional, and atmospheric patterns of rising temperatures — greater warming in winters than summers, greater warming at high latitudes than near the equator, and a cooling in the stratosphere while the lower atmosphere is warmer — jibe with what computer models predict should happen with greenhouse heating. And the warming comes at a time when, by rights, Earth should actually be cooler than normal. The sun’s radiance has dropped slightly since the 1970s, and dust thrown up by recent volcanic eruptions, especially that of Mexico’s El Chichon in 1982, should be keeping some sunlight from reaching the planet.

What’s important here, and remains important, scientists say, is how the patterns of atmospheric and climatic change reveal the most about the involvement of greenhouse gases, not simply the change in global temperature.

Even though most climatologists think Hansen’s claims are premature, they agree that warming is on the way. Carbon dioxide levels are 25 percent higher now than they were in 1860, and the atmosphere’s burden of greenhouse gases is expected to keep growing. By the middle of the next century the resulting warming could boost global mean temperatures from three to nine degrees Fahrenheit. That doesn’t sound like much, but it equals the temperature rise since the end of the last ice age, and the consequences could be devastating. Weather patterns could shift, bringing drought to once fertile areas and heavy rains to fragile deserts that cannot handle them. As runoff from melting glaciers increases and warming seawater expands, sea level could rise as much as six feet, inundating low-lying coastal areas and islands. There would be dramatic disruptions of agriculture, water resources, fisheries, coastal activity, and energy use.

The range of possible warming from a particular rise in greenhouse gas concentrations is only a little narrower than it was back then. Again, this remains a risk-management challenge. As Dr. Hansen says in the video interview, climate is not something that we will “fix.”

“Average climate will certainly get warmer,” says Roger Revelle, an oceanographer and climatologist at the University of California at San Diego. “But what’s more serious is how many more hurricanes we’ll have, how many more droughts we’ll have, how many days above one hundred degrees.” By Hansen’s reckoning, where Washington now averages one day a year over 100 degrees, it will average 12 such scorchers annually by the middle of the next century.

At the time, the basic notion that warmer seawater would fuel hurricanes was young and untested. Most scientists projecting many more, and stronger storms, including Kerry Emanuel (quoted farther down in my 1988 story), have since shifted to more nuanced projections. Enough time has passed that Dr. Emanuel and some other researchers say intensification has already been seen. But the hurricane-climate connection remains an idea its formative stages.

Comparable climate shifts have happened before, but over tens of centuries, not tens of years. The unprecedented rapid change could accelerate the already high rate of species extinction as plants and animals fail to adapt quickly enough. For the first time in history humans are affecting the ecological balance of not just a region but the entire world, all at once. “We’re altering the environment far faster than we can possibly predict the consequences,” says Stephen Schneider, a climate modeler at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. “This is bound to lead to some surprises.”

The situation then remains similar today in that the worst-case outcomes from a greenhouse-warmed world are clearly possible, but with the probability hard to nail down. This is one reason the policy debate, essentially over how much to invest in a climate insurance policy, remains turbulent.

A few themes that are central to climate discussions now were not part of the global warming story in 1988 — most notably the concept of thresholds and nonlinear “tipping points.” The evidence that climate can shift abruptly had not yet emerged from ice cores in Greenland. All the curves looking forward were smooth.

The rising role of developing countries was also described in the story, along with the looming challenge posed by the rise of China as an economic, and climatic, force:

In the end, the greatest obstacle facing those who are trying to slow the output of greenhouse gases is the fundamental and pervasive nature of the human activities that are causing the problem: deforestation, industrialization, energy production. As populations boom, productivity must keep up. And even as the developed nations of the world cut back on fossil fuel use, there will be no justifiable way to prevent the Third World from expanding its use of coal and oil. How can the developed countries expect that China, for example, which has plans to double its coal production in the next 15 years in order to spur development, will be willing or even able to change course?

Overall, the story captured the same situation that scientists are still trying to describe now: a world poised for momentous changes that would be hard to reverse; the need for adaptation to inevitable changes and changes in energy choices to cut the chances of utter calamity; and the need to act in the face of uncertainty.

The piece culminated with a quote from Michael McElroy, a climate expert at Harvard, speaking at the Toronto climate conference. It could still be delivered today.

Michael McElroy concluded, “If we choose to take on this challenge, it appears that we can slow the rate of change substantially, giving us time to develop mechanisms so that the cost to society and the damage to ecosystems can be minimized. We could alternatively close our eyes, hope for the best, and pay the cost when the bill comes due.”

Again, I’d love to hear your thoughts on particular sections of the story. Point them out in your comment and I’ll post the relevant paragraph and link to your contribution.

This does add a little perspective as to why it is so hard for you to give up this paradigm, Andy. Look, the models are wrong; CO2 has a slight warming effect, not magnified by water vapor. The warming effect of CO2 is not enough to keep the climate from following the influence of the sun. While we cool for the next I don’t know how many years, CO2 will be a boon for mankind.
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I think that rather than comment on the story (which is still timely), I would like to say that we have been fortunate that out of a world population of nearly 7 billion people, Dr. Hansen and you, Andy (among others who have stayed more in the background) were in the right place at the right time with the requisite intelligence, experience, and character to bring this information to the public, and that we are most fortunate that, 20 years later, neither of you has given up on this the most important issue of our time.

In 1988 I did an exhibit that I displayed for our Bread and Puppet Domestic Resurrection Circus in Glover Vermont. The exhibit was more then 100 Jus words plus Judicia and Judex.
This was extracted from Black’s Law Dictionary 5th Edition. The newer editions have less, 7 pages or so in the 5th edition and about a page in the newer editions.
Jus Aquaductis-The right to use the water, Jus Fromage-the right to forestaion were two of the the 100 plus old Roman Law , or at least Latin, subjects.
Judex and Judicia gave a certain amount of information about making laws and judgments.
The question of seeking justice remains and a prime matter regarding the environmental conditions. Logging for example often has laws surrounding it’s practice but though regulations might be in place they are often abused as are more civil statutes.
The bestiality of man that goes beyond what should be considered to be JUS practices can and do overwhelm the inherent capacity of nature to redeem itself, either because of Naivete or purposely because people fail to sincerely ask the question: is what we are about top do JUS.

I second your perfectly stated post, placing special emphasis on Dr. Hansen’s and Andy’s commitment to truth and equanimity throughout.

Kim, honestly, I respect the idea of not shooting the messenger, but your insistence on continually challenging respected, revered and indisputably accredited scientists and journalists is taking on complete and utter LUNACY, not to mention both diabolical and nefarious feeling tones.
It is scaring me now.
Elizabeth Tjader

kim (#1): “While we cool for the next I don’t know how many years, CO2 will be a boon for mankind.”

The world is cooling. No, it is warming. It is cooling. Are you kidding me? The scientific data is conclusive: the globe is warming. It’s cooling. No, it’s warming. Forget about the scientific data; they’re all wrong; the world is cooling. It is warming. No, it’s cooling. It’s indeed warming. No, it’s cooling. Come on!

What I find striking is that so much of that article could be published today and still be considered to reflect current understanding. I guess apart from the obvious point that the choir has been singing the same song for two decades while the hall slowly fills with listeners, it shows that the climate system is sufficiently complex that it takes more than 20 years to resolve major uncertainties.

I do think a few significant issues have been laid to rest, though, over the past 20 years. Three, off the top of my head:

1. Back in ’88 there was still quite a debate about whether the world was in fact warming or whether the temperature record had been contaminated by the urban heat island effect of cities springing up around former rural weather stations. That argument has been pretty convincingly resolved by several studies that statistically removed the effects of the affected weather stations and other confounding factors. The differences between satellite and surface temperature records are also now better understood.

2. The “global greening” hypothesis that rising CO2 concentrations would spawn an immense boost in plant productivity (which in turn would regulate CO2 levels by drawing them down) has been shown to be largely wishful thinking by field studies of plants. It turns out some species respond better to enhanced CO2 concentrations than others, and furthermore the projected effects of climate change could outweigh the benefits of higher CO2 in the atmosphere.

3. Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part, but I think today responsible debaters have become conscious of the futility of speaking in confident terms about the future. As Bill Moomaw of Tufts University once said, “our projections are based on a range of scenarios, but only time will tell which scenario turns out to be the real one.” Anyone who claims that “climate change is nothing to worry about” or conversely that “we’re in for a major disaster” is overstepping the bounds of what is known. The study of climate change is a science, not a religion. You can be swayed in one direction or another by the weight of the evidence, but it’s important to avoid filtering information to fit your preconceived notions. Skeptics often speak in confident terms, which encourages “believers” to retort in equally confident terms. That’s a mistake.

From post number one.
(Look, the models are wrong; CO2 has a slight warming effect, not magnified by water vapor).

Interesting. In Hansens own words the variance of the sun is small compaared to what co2 and extra water vapor do to the insulating effect of holding back infrared radiation. Also the sun is in solar minima right now at its lowest radiative output per square meter. When we reach solar maxima, there will be world temperature records set on the warm side within a few years from now.

The scientists are not dumb. They understand the ins and outs of thermal resistance to infrared in our atmosphere.

Thanks for putting the global warming story in perspective. Just 18 months after you wrote your article for Discover magazine, I attended the “Global Forum” in Moscow in January, 1990. There, in sub freezing weather, I remember seeing Al Gore give a slide presentation on global warming and Carl Sagan give a talk on the four greatest threats to humanity: nuclear war, loss of the ozone layer, overpopulation, and climate change.

Today, eighteen years later, Al Gore has won an Oscar for his slide show and the ozone hole is on the mend. Unfortunately, Carl Sagan is no longer with us and the threats of overpopulation, nuclear war and climate change are still with us. Nevertheless, I think it’s safe to say we’ve made a little progress over the past 20 years.

I am particularly interested in how current average global temperatures relate to those of the past. I read recently (in E. C. Pielou, ‘After the Ice Age’) that toward the end of the last ice age – but long before the glaciers had receded from the continental U.S. – average global temperatures climbed to 2-3 degrees Centigrade above those of the modern era, a condition that obviously reversed at some point. What were the dynamics that caused both the increase and the subsequent decrease? I don’t question global warming is occurring, but the issue demands more of a geo-historical context than it typically gets in news and commentary, in my view.

strange that with global temps going down for 6 years straight and not having reached 1998 highs since 1998….no one is admitting that we have been a bit cofused. in fact, according to UAH data, it is COOLER today than 20 years ago when Hansen first made his announcement. is no one going to mention that?

if temps continue to fall like they have been the past 18 months…we are in Serious trouble as we will quickly dip BELOW the 100 year averages into colder temps.

After twenty years of observing the Climate Wars, from the sidelines and the battlefield alike, this seems less a corrective than an illustration of the Bourbon Historiography –“-they have remembered nothing , they have forgotten nothing”– to which many science journalists seem prey.

Finding myself in the same foxhole as Steve Schneider when the “Nuclear Winter ‘ balloon went up–it was launched on the anniversary of Orson Welles’ War of The Worlds Broadcast with a media graphics package prepared by the Creative Department of that great K-Street PR institution Porter Novell Inc., I remarked to him that it all seemed like a bad joke on Cold War policy analysts, played at the expense of the credibility of climate modeling on the eve of the global warming debate.

We both wrote critically of it in Foreign Affairs, and were of course lambasted for our insensitivity by such worthies as Helen Caldicott and Eric Chivian, who thought they had a bounden duty to scare the world into disarmament by resorting to florid myth-mongering on prime time.

Twenty years later, whom should I see in the front row of a Harvard seminar on global warming journalism, Chaired by Cordelia Dean, no less, than Eric- plus ca change, plus de la meme chose.

Why must the side that gets the sign of the effect right spend so much more special effects money ,and air time to quantitative exaggeration rather than promoting qualitative understanding ?

The semiotic overkill and addiction to self-justified disinformation that has become the cultural norm in the Climate Wars is enough to drive one to reading the primary scientific literature for R&R.

U.S. Government: Extreme Weather Probably Caused by Global Warming
A new Bush administration report on recent extreme weather, such as flooding in the Midwest, says that human-caused climate change is making storms more intense, with downpours that used to occur every two decades likely to increase in frequency.
Thomas Karl, co-editor of the report, said, “As greenhouse gasses increase, the faster they increase, the more extreme weather and climate events we’ll be seeing.” The report is the administration’s first major compilation of climate change data.
The report says extreme weather will be the most challenging aspect of climate change, noting that days in the upper Midwest when it has rained more than 4 inches have increased by 50 percent. Karl said the hotter atmosphere holds more moisture.

So Karl thinks hotter atmosphere holds more moisture, brilliant.
It is clear, then, that wisdom is knowledge having to do with certain principles and causes. But now, since it is this knowledge that we are seeking, we must consider the following point: of what kind of principles and of what kind of causes is wisdom the knowledge? (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 340BC)

I do know one thing for sure what I have seen on c-span and the Senate the last few months is nether wisdom or knowledge unless a quorum call is wisdom.

Give us time to develop mechanisms, yes. But do not rush to any solution.

No matter what we Earthlings do to dig ourselves out of our messy nest, The Law of Unintended Consequences seems to take hold. Frankensteinien technology still rules, so we must resist the temptation of it.

Minimize damage to ecosystems. That is the definition of a “duh.”

We have already lost enough of the ocean. There is no argument, except from the “let’s keep grinding up horseshoe crabs for fertilizer or we’ll lose jobs” lobby. Surely there are another forty jobs somewhere else, perhaps cleaning up Exxon messes. That’s a lifetime career now.

We could close our eyes and hope for the best. But that’s what we have been doing ever since Silent Spring. We are paying for our mistakes now.

Keep an eye on horseshoe crab/Red Knot populations.

We must strive not to embrace all recent technology as the deus-ex-machina.

the warmest spring on record… when are we going to stop kimming ourselves and get to work? These blatant kims that CheneyOilCo feeds us as gospel in an unholy attempt to garner obscene wealth are by now, so transparent to as to hold no value whatsoever. Yet we the kimmists continue to produce ranting points that are supposed to have some validity. Their only purpose is to kim and stall… and guess what? It works. How kimful do they have to get before we just discredit them completely and turn our full attention towards effectively addressing the problems in an adult way? Twenty years of kimmism should be enough to teach us something.

the short-sighted 20-year graph is a joke. the 80’s and 90’s have indeed been the peak, which is now tapering off… but if you’d bother looking at long-term graphs, you’d notice they’re tapering off at a VERY high level above what temperatures used to be.

and maybe you’d even notice that sometimes temberatures drop a bit for a while, only to go up even higher afterwards. at best, we’re in a momentary cooling stage which is NOT the same as an actual global cooling, or a proof against global warming, or anything absurd of the sort.

Somehow, there have got to be ways found for us to more ably become engaged in our efforts to move from talking about threat approaching threat of global challenges to doing something about them.

Perhaps the family of humanity needs to select a new, foresighted leadership group that is capable of formulating new policies and advancing alternative programs of action.

How do organize and mobilize for constructive action?

In any case, it does appear that Spencer (#17) is surely correct in what he reports. Even so, the window of opportunity in which meaningful action can occur appears to be closing……at an accelerating rate. Responding ably in a timely fashion is one of the challenges before us, I suppose.

Climate Change is one of the many important topics that make Gerard O’Neill’s vision so important and timely. David R. Criswell’s Lunar Solar Power ideas are an improvement in a first step towards O’Neill’s vision. Why argue over a testable claim, such as the existence of Global Warming, when you can move to solve the problem almost incidentally, should it turn out to be one?

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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.